Well, it’s been about 7½ years since I bought my first bike and started riding, and really, about 5 years since I started riding seriously as a means of transportation.

In late 2011 my father and I went halves in a pair of GPS/CB radio units, it was a 2 for 1 deal and so we bought these two units at about $400 each, normally they’d be about $700 individually. So there I started logging the distance I covered. I just used the in-built odometer on the GPS, resetting it when the bike went in for service.

When I got the mountain bike, I realised I needed to track the distance covered by each bike to ensure they all went in at their 1000km service on-time. So being a programmer by trade, I coded up a crude CGI/Perl script that used a SQLite back-end to log the odometer readings. It was a simple HTML form where I could enter the distance at regular intervals. Crucially, it worked with the “feature phone” I used at the time.

The SQL views (no such thing as stored procedures in standard SQLite3) took care of actually calculating the differentials and so I used that to track my progress. So far so good. I’ve now had this in place since mid-2012 and I’ve brought in some of my data from early 2012, thus I’m now starting to see some trends.

Distances by year

Year

Distance (km)

2012

5594.9

2013

4837.78

2014

4593.42

Am I getting lazy? Well, hard to say there. I go out less on the weekends and have also optimised my routes to reduce distances somewhat. Some of this is weather-dependent, in the heat one does not feel like going outdoors.

Distance by month-of-year

Month

Distance (km)

01

282.59

02

406.20

03

409.10

04

377.42

05

511.29

06

493.36

07

330.01

08

532.05

09

494.21

10

470.14

11

370.27

12

394.13

I’m not sure why there’s a lull in activity around July, but the most active months seem to be May and August. The lull in January can be somewhat attributed to the end of the Christmas break. I guess if anything, I should aim to be more active in July when the weather is the coolest.

Guess I’ll be keeping an eye on what happens over time with these stats and see if I can get them up a bit.

The following graph will continuously update as I pump data in. We’ll see what happens.